Rebecca Arnold – författare

Fashion is a dynamic global industry that plays an important role in the economic, political, cultural, and social lives of an international audience. It spans high art and popular culture, and plays a significant role in material and visual culture. This book introduces fashion's myriad influences and manifestations. Fashion is explored as a creative force, a business, and a means of communication. From Karl Lagerfeld's creative reinventions of Chanel's iconic style to the multicultural reference points of Indian designer Manish Arora, from the spectacular fashion shows held in nineteenth century department stores to the mix-and-match styles of Japanese youth, the book examines the ways that fashion both reflects and shapes contemporary culture. Using historical and contemporary examples, it gives a clear understanding of how fashion has developed since the renaissance, while raising questions about its status, ethical credibility, and influence on consumers.The book provides insight into the structure of the fashion industry and how fashions are designed, promoted and consumed, in relation to relevant historical, social and cultural contexts. It is structured thematically, to look at the role and development of designers, the growth of shopping and the different businesses involved in making and selling fashionable clothes. Fashion's relationship to the wider culture is also explored, by considering its representation in art and collaborations between designers and artists, the moral controversies surrounding fashion, and attempts to produce ethical clothing, and the effects of globalisation on the fashion trade.ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Winner of the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2022Traditionally associated with rural ways of life in England, often hand-crafted and held up as one of the only items of English folk dress to survive into the 20th century, the smock frock is an object of curiosity in many museum collections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from surviving garments to newspapers and photographs, this book reveals the hidden history of the smock frock to present new social histories.Discussing the smock frock in its widest contexts, Alison Toplis explores how garments were handmade and manufactured by the ready-made clothing industry, and bought by men of different trades. She traces the smock frock’s usage across England as well as in export markets such as Australia. Following the garment’s decline in the late 19th century, the book investigates how this essentially utilitarian style of workwear came to be held up as an example of disappearing ‘peasant’ craft in an emotional response to urbanisation, and how it was preserved by collectors under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement.Around the turn of the 20th century, the smock frock was reinvented as both women’s and children’s wear and is now regularly revived in fashion collections by the likes of Molly Goddard. Drawing together extensive visual and material cultures, Alison Toplis unravels a new history of the smock frock.

In the first critical history of French ready-made fashion, Alexis Romano examines an array of cultural sources, including surviving garments, fashion magazines, film, photography and interviews, to weave together previously disparate historical narratives. The resulting volume – Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women – situates the ready-made in wider cultural discourses of art, design, urbanism, technology and international policy.Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68.By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.

During the interwar years, a proliferation of violence encroached upon the glossy, idealistic world of fashion: from the curiously common appearance of dismembered heads in fashion illustration, to seemingly torturous techniques and devices advertised by beauty imagery, even extending to garments designed to look assaulted and destroyed. Danger in the Path of Chic brings this disturbing imagery to light for the first time, proposing new directions for historians of fashion, violence and culture in the interwar years.Concentrating on London, Paris and New York as fashion centres and political allies, the volume explores why horror manifested itself in this way, at this time, and in a sphere that is usually perceived as being built on fantasy and escape. In doing so, Danger in the Path of Chic situates fashion within the very real social, psychological, economic and political traumas of the period.

This is the story of clothes as pictures and of the importance and meanings of the way we picture clothes.Focusing on the rapid changes of the interwar period, fashion is explored as a sensory interplay of images. From illustrations to editorial spreads, and amateur snapshots to Hollywood film, Documenting Fashion considers how American fashion was represented and created by visual culture. The chapters comprise thematic case studies of interconnected images that build to create a discussion of fashion as embodied experience, foregrounding the way that all viewers are also wearers, consuming magazines and other types of images, just as they purchase clothing and accessories.Examining how mediums constructed and impacted the meaning of fashion during the 1920s and 1930s, the book tracks interconnections between technologies that developed in, for example, handheld cameras and Technicolor and Kodachrome color film. Aspects of photography itself are also considered such as hybrid and manipulated images, as well as light, shadow and colour’s impact on depictions of fashion and the body. Newspapers, fashion and women’s magazines such as Vogue and The Delineator are analysed alongside examples from the Black media, including Abbott’s Monthly Magazine and The Afro-American.Conceived as a revisionist history, diverse types of images of Black, white and Chinese Americans are analysed to argue for a more rounded examination of the ways dress, style and self-image were represented in still and moving images and how such imagery created a particularly American vision of vernacular modernity.

Winner of the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2022Traditionally associated with rural ways of life in England, often hand-crafted and held up as one of the only items of English folk dress to survive into the 20th century, the smock frock is an object of curiosity in many museum collections. Drawing on a wide variety of sources from surviving garments to newspapers and photographs, this book reveals the hidden history of the smock frock to present new social histories.Discussing the smock frock in its widest contexts, Alison Toplis explores how garments were handmade and manufactured by the ready-made clothing industry, and bought by men of different trades. She traces the smock frock’s usage across England as well as in export markets such as Australia. Following the garment’s decline in the late 19th century, the book investigates how this essentially utilitarian style of workwear came to be held up as an example of disappearing ‘peasant’ craft in an emotional response to urbanisation, and how it was preserved by collectors under the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement.Around the turn of the 20th century, the smock frock was reinvented as both women’s and children’s wear and is now regularly revived in fashion collections by the likes of Molly Goddard. Drawing together extensive visual and material cultures, Alison Toplis unravels a new history of the smock frock.

In the first critical history of French ready-made fashion, Alexis Romano examines an array of cultural sources, including surviving garments, fashion magazines, film, photography and interviews, to weave together previously disparate historical narratives. The resulting volume – Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women – situates the ready-made in wider cultural discourses of art, design, urbanism, technology and international policy.Through a close study of fashion magazines, including Vogue and Elle, Romano reveals how the French ready-made and the genre of fashion photography in France developed in tandem. Analyses of representations of space, women and prêt-à-porter in such magazines – alongside other cultural ephemera such as contemporary film, documentary photography and family photographs – demonstrate that popular conceptions of fashion and modernity shifted in the period 1945-68.By connecting national and personal histories, Prêt-à-Porter: Paris and Women reveals the importance of the ready-made to broader narratives of postwar reconstruction, national identity, gender and international dialogue.

During the interwar years, a proliferation of violence encroached upon the glossy, idealistic world of fashion: from the curiously common appearance of dismembered heads in fashion illustration, to seemingly torturous techniques and devices advertised by beauty imagery, even extending to garments designed to look assaulted and destroyed. Danger in the Path of Chic brings this disturbing imagery to light for the first time, proposing new directions for historians of fashion, violence and culture in the interwar years.Concentrating on London, Paris and New York as fashion centres and political allies, the volume explores why horror manifested itself in this way, at this time, and in a sphere that is usually perceived as being built on fantasy and escape. In doing so, Danger in the Path of Chic situates fashion within the very real social, psychological, economic and political traumas of the period.

Revisiting Dana Bertran Merrill’s remarkable archive, this innovative interrogation of photographs of the anonymous workforce who built the Madeira-Mamoré railroad reveals how fashion inhabited a landscape defined by extractive capitalism, transnational migration, and uneven networks of power. Bringing fashion studies into conversation with photography and the histories of labor and colonialism, it foregrounds the presence of migrant labourers from across the globe, Caribbean washerwomen, North American contractors, Brazilian engineers and sanitarians, and Indigenous communities. The result is a vivid account of how the camera both reinforced and unsettled racialised systems of classification and control.Fashion at the Frontier offers fresh perspectives on fashion, time and archival silence, opening up new ways of understanding dress within the wider histories of Latin America and global modernity.

Exploring the proliferation of makeup as both practice and metaphor across intellectual, visual and material culture, this transnational study involves analysis of French, British, German and Russian art, philosophy, fiction, journalism and advice manuals.From its negative early modern associations with the sensual and the superficial to its acceptance and widespread use in the 1910s, Ksenia Gusarova traces makeup’s many transformations.Across centuries and national boundaries, associations between makeup and visual arts, particularly painting, were fairly commonplace in European intellectual and popular culture. Though mostly unflattering, occasionally comparisons were made that challenged established aesthetic hierarchies in order to promote new definitions of art. The Art of Beauty examines the discourse about cosmetics as (inferior) art, arguing for its important role in policing the boundaries of what was considered artistic practice and who was allowed to engage in it, with regard to gender in particular, but also class and race.

This innovative study offers the first full-length account of George Washington as a figure shaped through dress, appearance, and the material politics of the 18th-century Atlantic world.Drawing on extensive archival, visual and material evidence—ledgers, tailors’ invoices, military orders, correspondence, and plantation records as well as portraits and surviving items of dress—Ballard demonstrates how clothing structured Washington’s self-presentation as planter, soldier, and emerging national leader.Foregrounding the labor and expertise of enslaved and indentured valets, spinners, weavers, hairdressers, and artisans, the book reveals how Washington’s sartorial life depended on systems of coercion and global trade. Ballard combines interdisciplinary methods from material culture studies, art history, Black studies, and fashion theory to reconstruct how Washington used clothing to navigate rank, authority, racial hierarchy, diplomacy, and reputation.George Washington, Slavery, and the New Politics of Style, 1743-1789 reframes foundational narratives by treating dress as a form of political thought, one which shaped militia uniforms, the visual identity of the Continental Army, and the symbolic language of the early republic. Richly documented and conceptually ambitious, the book invites scholars to reconsider the cultural formation of the United States through the textiles, bodies, and labor that made Washington visible and offers invaluable context and insights for students in fashion, American history and culture, and beyond.

This innovative study offers the first full-length account of George Washington as a figure shaped through dress, appearance, and the material politics of the 18th-century Atlantic world.Drawing on extensive archival, visual and material evidence—ledgers, tailors’ invoices, military orders, correspondence, and plantation records as well as portraits and surviving items of dress—Ballard demonstrates how clothing structured Washington’s self-presentation as planter, soldier, and emerging national leader.Foregrounding the labor and expertise of enslaved and indentured valets, spinners, weavers, hairdressers, and artisans, the book reveals how Washington’s sartorial life depended on systems of coercion and global trade. Ballard combines interdisciplinary methods from material culture studies, art history, Black studies, and fashion theory to reconstruct how Washington used clothing to navigate rank, authority, racial hierarchy, diplomacy, and reputation.George Washington, Slavery, and the New Politics of Style, 1743-1789 reframes foundational narratives by treating dress as a form of political thought, one which shaped militia uniforms, the visual identity of the Continental Army, and the symbolic language of the early republic. Richly documented and conceptually ambitious, the book invites scholars to reconsider the cultural formation of the United States through the textiles, bodies, and labor that made Washington visible and offers invaluable context and insights for students in fashion, American history and culture, and beyond.

Between 1974 and 1989, significant changes were taking place in the lives of Singaporean women and in their local fashion industry. These shifts were not only reflected in but actively shaped by the magazine Her World.In Her World, Women and Fashion in Singapore, Nadya Wang uses dress as a lens through which to view fragments of the magazine over 15 years. Advocating for a new and decentred understanding of the evolution of the Singapore woman, Wang’s writing also traces the creation of a fashion industry that pivoted from seeking validation from global fashion cities to establishing itself as the lead of a Southeast Asian fashion community.Visual analysis of archival materials is combined with oral history interviews to demonstrate how the women of Singapore engaged with local and global ideas, fashion and beauty commodities, and imagery of models and beauty queens in their self-fashioning. Challenging existing understandings of their agency, this book attests to the creativity and adaptability of Singapore women and Singapore fashion designers.

Between 1974 and 1989, significant changes were taking place in the lives of Singaporean women and in their local fashion industry. These shifts were not only reflected in but actively shaped by the magazine Her World.In Her World, Women and Fashion in Singapore, Nadya Wang uses dress as a lens through which to view fragments of the magazine over 15 years. Advocating for a new and decentred understanding of the evolution of the Singapore woman, Wang’s writing also traces the creation of a fashion industry that pivoted from seeking validation from global fashion cities to establishing itself as the lead of a Southeast Asian fashion community.Visual analysis of archival materials is combined with oral history interviews to demonstrate how the women of Singapore engaged with local and global ideas, fashion and beauty commodities, and imagery of models and beauty queens in their self-fashioning. Challenging existing understandings of their agency, this book attests to the creativity and adaptability of Singapore women and Singapore fashion designers.

This is the story of clothes as pictures and of the importance and meanings of the way we picture clothes.Focusing on the rapid changes of the interwar period, fashion is explored as a sensory interplay of images. From illustrations to editorial spreads, and amateur snapshots to Hollywood film, Documenting Fashion considers how American fashion was represented and created by visual culture. The chapters comprise thematic case studies of interconnected images that build to create a discussion of fashion as embodied experience, foregrounding the way that all viewers are also wearers, consuming magazines and other types of images, just as they purchase clothing and accessories.Examining how mediums constructed and impacted the meaning of fashion during the 1920s and 1930s, the book tracks interconnections between technologies that developed in, for example, handheld cameras and Technicolor and Kodachrome color film. Aspects of photography itself are also considered such as hybrid and manipulated images, as well as light, shadow and colour’s impact on depictions of fashion and the body. Newspapers, fashion and women’s magazines such as Vogue and The Delineator are analysed alongside examples from the Black media, including Abbott’s Monthly Magazine and The Afro-American.Conceived as a revisionist history, diverse types of images of Black, white and Chinese Americans are analysed to argue for a more rounded examination of the ways dress, style and self-image were represented in still and moving images and how such imagery created a particularly American vision of vernacular modernity.

From the end of the 1930s through the 1940s, the New York fashion industry came into its own. Sportswear, which had evolved from its sporting origins to include simple casual wear for town and country, travel and leisure, was at the centre of this shift. Sportwear provided busy career women, college girls and housewives with clothes that could be worn on all occasions.Drawing on a wonderful array of sources, from fashion magazines to department store records, this book is the rich and absorbing narrative and analysis of how New York sportswear evolved to become the definitive American style and how a modern fashion aesthetic was born. The story that unfolds reveals, with the aid of some wonderful illustrations, how New York's emergent style became dynamic and modern, like the city itself, expressive of the American ideal of athletic, long-limbed women; and how it tapped into both metropolitan Americanness and the America of wide-open spaces.It explores the designers, such as Claire McCardell, Clare Potter and Tina Leser, themselves embodiments of the modern, active woman, and how they gave middle class American women New York sportswear as an alternative to Parisian-inspired designs.It looks for the first time at how its style connected not just to ideals of patriotism and democracy, but to current notions of cleanliness and hygiene, and for example, to 1930s theories of body image, and contemporary dance.

This text argues that fashion and the imagery surrounding it give us a vision of Western culture that is both enticing and alienating, flaunting capitalism's euphoric emblems of glamour and success but also representing the underside of modern life. In the 1970s, photographers like Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton set models against backdrops of tarnished glamour; in the 1990s Alexander McQueen and John Galliano created decadent femmes fatales whose sexual allure was equally tempting and threatening. Rebecca Arnold exlores the complex nature of modern fashion, attempting to unravel the contradictory emotions of desire and anxiety that it provokes.

From the end of the 1930s through the 1940s, the New York fashion industry came into its own. Sportswear, which had evolved from its sporting origins to include simple casual wear for town and country, travel and leisure, was at the centre of this shift. Sportswear provided busy career women, college girls and housewives with clothes that could be worn on all occasions.Drawing on a wonderful array of sources, from fashion magazines to department store records, this book is the rich and absorbing narrative and analysis of how New York sportswear evolved to become the definitive American style and how a modern fashion aesthetic was born. The story that unfolds reveals, with the aid of some wonderful illustrations, how New York's emergent style became dynamic and modern, like the city itself, expressive of the American ideal of athletic, long-limbed women; and how it tapped into both metropolitan Americanness and the America of wide-open spaces.It explores the designers, such as Claire McCardell, Clare Potter and Tina Leser, themselves embodiments of the modern, active woman, and how they gave middle class American women New York sportswear as an alternative to Parisian-inspired designs.It looks for the first time at how its style connected not just to ideals of patriotism and democracy, but to current notions of cleanliness and hygiene, and for example, to 1930s theories of body image, and contemporary dance.